For my weekly writing spot on this site, see the One-Minute Mystic, with a new meditation posted every Monday. Also see The Village, the story of Misty Longings, England's most beautiful village, posted episode by episode earlier this year.       In the chill light of dawn, economist and poet face each other. With the gauntlet thrown down, it's twelve paces and then pistol crack. Heaven knows, it's no way to solve a dispute. But what are the alternatives? It's Gross National Product against Gross National Well-being and there will be blood. There's currently a spring in the step of economic journalists, and why not? For here they are, suddenly interesting; with the seat of honour at every news banquet. In former times, it was different. Sport was interesting; but economics was just, well, eyes-glaze-over dull. Who in their right mind wanted to hear about bank rates and government bonds? Who even knew the meaning of 'quantitive easing'? Yet now such things are the guts of our day; each news programme, a well stuffed sandwich of economic happening. And there at the centre of it all, like the spider minding its web, is the economic expert. They have the gnosis. They know about recapitalisation; the effect of the exchange rate on business and downside to deflationary pressures. They can tell us everything we need to know about our slide into depression! Except how to change it. Economists have learned things down the years. They now know the sequence of events: Prosperity-recession-depression-recovery. But spotting the cycle is one thing; preventing it is another. So yes, economists complain about bishops entering the debate, saying they know nothing – which may be true. But more pressing is the fact that they themselves know nothing – as their endless false forecasts reveal. What we discover in each economic crisis is that it's a case of trial and error – until something somehow works. It's then like pass the parcel. Whoever's pulling the financial strings when the depression stops, is the new economic genius. Poets don't know anything either, of course; but somehow make a virtue of it. Poets tend to wonder, observe and probe – but not forecast. Because there's nothing to know, other than what is before our eyes. Poets would have us notice a present and dazzling world, which includes money markets, but is not defined by them. And their currency is not hard, like the dollar, but elusive, like truth's superb surprise; too bright to describe, too sharp to handle, yet possible to glimpse when the angles of the heart are coterminous with the moment. I was recently given a book called Soul Food: nourishing poems for starved minds. Including such poets as Rumi, Mary Oliver, RS Thomas, Rilke and Emily Dickinson, it's a sharp-eyed cloud of witnesses to a world littered with momentary meaning, awkward stones and unusual delight. These writers are not useful in any way at all; but they are indispensable. Economical with words; but not with their truth. And so it is that in the pale dawn, pistols at the ready, economist and poet stand face to face. You watch beneath the awakening sky, as GNP takes on GNW-B. And perhaps appropriately, amid such financial and moral suspense, your heart pounds. Soul Food is published by Bloodaxe Books, £7.99 More writings © Simon Parke